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Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun
Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.
Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them.
Actually it is the other way around in terms of cause and effect. The Chinese Script (Kanji) evolved because there are very few phonetic variations in the spoken language and they needed a way to make sure that you can mean different things even if essentially the same sounds are coming out of your mouth. Ditto for Japanese as well. The phonetic range is severely limited compared to say English or Sanskrit. You may find this interesting
This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context.
It is, however, not as bad as you make it sound; the "context" is very often that certain meanings are expressed by certain combinations of words. The main reason why we think of Chinese as very confusing, I think, is that we associate 1 character with 1 word - which was the way it worked originally, but it would be more accurate to say that each character is a "mono-syllabic meme" which can occasionaly stand on its own, but more often is combined to form polysyllabic words. In this sense Chinese is actually not that dissimilar to most other languages.
Thus you have "qiche" (two characters) meaning "car" or "to ride a bicycle" - the ambiguity being an artifact of my inability to conveniently represent the tones of the language. Traditionally the "qi" part of it means "steam" and "che" means vehicle, so "qi" is still used in many combinations that are associated with steam and "che" is used as part of most vehicles.
This is my freedom we're talking about, right?
Wow. I mean, just, wow. What we're talking about here is subversion of censorship in a tool of government manipulation of information. Per the above-linked (informative) comment, This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. Perhaps you failed to RTFA (shock amazement) and so missed this part of the article: "The resilient and intelligent caonima fight back to defeat the river crabs - yet another play on words. The pronunciation of river crab resembles "harmony" - a favourite slogan of the current Communist Party leadership. It has become common practice among internet writers whose posts have been deleted to say they have been "harmonised" - or "eaten by the river crab". Thus "river crab" has become a code name for internet censors." So in fact the entire battle is over censorship, it is not just a big jerkoff wankfest, and I do not believe that it is a false dichotomy to say that you either can see how this is relevant and in fact positive, or you do not understand the value of the freedom of speech. Perhaps you should read up on Parody and Satire so that you can better understand the concept. He who laughs, lasts. He who laughs last usually didn't get the joke.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps - one point of view is that all forms of censorship are wrong.
Another reasonable point of view is that banning something is justified if there is overwhelming evidence of harm. So one might make that argument if child pr0n - but not with "This image/word/etc is disgusting!" One could also make that argument with defamation (where it's shown that the false claims have harmed someone in some way).
Also note that copyright laws are less broad in that they don't ban all forms of an image, just that particular instances can only be distributed it by those who created the work. Also I think it's more sensible to treat this as a civil issue (so yes, I would disagree with places that criminalise it).
Be careful of polarising the issue - yes, there certainly are real examples of censorship in western countries - though then, that does not make it okay! It makes it bad in both cases. But the last thing you want in a debate is to suggest that someone can only be against censorship if they also support allowing child pr0n - that would be a fallacy.
Unfortunately I do feel that, in the UK at least, we are on a slippery slope. In 1978 when child images were criminalised, people questioned whether it was needed (and IIRC, it was only punishable with a fine). It applied only to under-16s. Three decades on, and laws are now being rushed through that criminalise things such as images of consenting adults, and cartoons that appear to depict under-18s, all on the grounds that they are "disgusting".
A cursory viewing of Cantonese phonetics reveals that the near-open front unrounded vowel (the "a" in "cat") doesn't exist. The open-mid front unrounded vowel (the "e" in "bed") does exist in Cantonese.
The reason she doesn't hear a difference is because the difference between the "a" and "e" in those two words is slight at best. The vowel height and vowel backness are nearly identical. The fact that she doesn't have the habituation to hear the difference between them is because her native language doesn't have the sounds as different phonemes. If you don't learn to distinguish certain phonemes by the time you're, say, three years old, it becomes extremely difficult. It's connected to the Critical period in linguistics, but Wiki reports the boundary as sometime between five and puberty. However, that's for acquiring a native language. I think for acquiring the necessary phonological discernment, the cutoff age is much earlier. But IANALinguist.
For fun, listen to the "p" in "happen" (it's called a voiceless bilabial plosive because your voicebox doesn't generate sound (voiceless), you use two lips (bilabial), and you explode air out after building up pressure (plosive)) and the "p" in "parrot."
Rather, you won't hear a difference. Technically, one is aspirated and one is unaspirated.
But I guarantee you native Hindi speakers can hear a difference--in Hindi, they are different sounds that can affect the meaning of words; not so in English.
I'm not sure about native Spanish speakers. In Spanish, the aspirated "p" ("parrot"'s "p") doesn't even exist.